Jack Krebs Speaks Out

Jack Krebs, president of Kansas Citizens for Science, gave a talk on “What’s the matter with the Standards” at Johnson County Community College this past Monday. Jack has kindly made the audio available as a set of MP3 format files. Jack’s original post on this is here. If what’s going on in Kansas is of any interest to you, you should check out these files. And these are the direct links to the downloads:

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Forgive me, but I find it hard to take Casey Luskin seriously. He's a mouthpiece for the Discovery Institute who always reminds me of a voluble squirrel: he chatters away frenetically, but the brain behind his words is tiny and... Read More

The text of the Calvert portion is quite revealing, and, alas, as I suspected: Calvert is opposed to teaching the kids the facts. He’s not just opposed to teaching the facts of life (an assumption on my part), but he appears to be opposed to teaching any facts at all.

Smoke him out. Get him to commit to teaching the facts, first, before introducing any controversy – since that is the pedagogically sound way of doing it (see American history, economics, health, anything else important in any curriculm).

So let me get this straight. According to Calvert you can either believe in science or God but not both. So he wants to use your tax dollars to advertise his tax free church in public schools in place of science. He doesn’t want any other view of God advertised, just his. And if you don’t comply he complains that you have hidden the facts, suppressed the truth and forced young people to become atheists, since they have never been exposed to any view other than naturalism. Of course this is nonsense. Students can be exposed to any and all religious ideas and traditions in other classes. Why must they learn about religion in science class? Also, it seems to me that this argument presupposes that no one will ever go to his church unless they are told about it in school! No wonder he seems so desperate for free advertising. If Calvert wants to lose the freesom to preach in his tax free church, all he has to do is keep trying this nonsense until some church takes over the government, because it probably won’t be his church that runs things then.

In this direction [pointing to the right], if you just believe you’re a product of material cause, you’ll have a whole different set of exits: exits for secular humanism, atheism, Buddhism and other Eastern religions, with different views of morals.

Talk about xenophobia (that’s the right word, isn’t it?).

“Buddhism … with different views of morals”.

OMFG!

That you should refrain from taking life no matter what God tells you????!!! HOW THE HELL CAN THIS BE ALLOWED????!!!

If God tells you to kill non-believers when Armageddon arrives, Buddhism would get in the way!!

That you should avoid taking substances that can cause you to do stupid things????!!!

Does Calvert even know that Buddhist sects morals on sex for purposes other than for reproduction puts a lot of modern Christian culture to shame?

Hell, if any life philosophy should be sponsored by government it should be a subset of the Eightfold Path in Buddhism (not that I think the government should be teaching that even). It’s very religously neutral, not to mention encourages people to seek outside the box, unlike Christianity which tries to convince you there is nothing outside the box.

if you just believe you’re a product of material cause, you’ll have a whole different set of exits: exits for secular humanism, atheism, Buddhism and other Eastern religions

But ID isn’t about religion. No sirree Bob. It’s just them lying atheist darwinists who say it is.

(snicker) (giggle)

This is why I love fundies so much. They KNOW, absolutely KNOW, that every time they preach, they lose in court. So what do they do? Yep – they preach anyway. If they wantt o have any chance whatever of getting their crap into a science classroom, they MUST, absolutely MUST, shut their big mouths about their religious aims and motives. And they simply can’t do it. They don’t even WANT to do it. Their religious aims and motives are the only thing they care about.

I can’t wait for this thing to get inside a court room. It’ll be Dover all over again, only worse this time.

The trouble is, KCFS hosts a forum that is in a large part full of attacks on religion, some quite vicious and personal.

KCFS disclaims all responsibility, but if for example a local church hosted a website with a forum which contained attacks on a given subject…but the church disclaimed responsibility…would they buy that argument or be complaining loudly?